“I’m afraid I don’t follow, sir.”

“Do you believe in God, Reed?”

“Yes, I do. And our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

“As I said, you are convinced and so it is fact. When in reality, I am your savior, the one who cut the abomination from your side and gave your life back, to live and to love and to make your children, is that not true?”

In the meager light from his lantern, Grace could see Reed’s cheek muscles jumping as his teeth gritted. “You did, sir, saved my life and rightly so. Yet you are not the son of God.”

“Unless I believed myself to be so, and then it would be so. To me, at any rate.”

“I’m not sure what you’re wanting me to say, sir.”

“Say that you’ll bring Grace a stool, and be on your way. I’ve taxed you enough for the day. And when you send for Dr. Thornhollow, ask that he may stop and pass the time with me as he goes about his bloody business.”

“Dr. Thornhollow, sir? The surgeon over at Mayfaire?”

“Yes, Reed. We’ve come to that time again. Grace’s arrival says the Board is coming. We’ve a new patient whose screams smell of delirium and by the scent of Heedson’s blood he’s nigh in a panic. He’ll call for Thornhollow. He’ll call for the one that wields the knife.”

NINE

The girl with spiders for blood came into the cellar like a typhoon, her screams breaking the companionable silence that Falsteed and Grace had established. In her own panic, Grace moved the low milking stool Reed had brought her from the stables next to Falsteed’s cell, her hand groping for his in the darkness. The iron bars pressed cold against her shoulder, and she was about to call for him when she felt his dry, warm hands close over hers.

“Needing some support from the sane, love?” His voice was almost next to her ear, but she didn’t shy away from it.

“Do you call yourself sane?”

He chuckled, a sound of true mirth that flowed low under the high-pitched screams of the spider girl.

“I do. I’d put the same label on yourself, though I sense you’d deny it.”

Her hand pulsed in his, and he squeezed her back. “Do I have a right to claim sanity?” she asked, her voice still hoarse from disuse. “I’m cursed with a perfect recollection of all things and have seen things no one should—even once. To have it shown to me again and again, eyes open or shut, would truly make one mad.”

“Maybe,” Falsteed said. “But I’ve smelled you, smelled the wrongness of all that’s been done to you by hands familiar and those of strangers. You chose to stop acknowledging a world that has treated you foully. What’s saner than that?”

Grace sat still in the darkness, allowing the screams of the spider girl to roll over her from the cell opposite hers. The truth of Falsteed’s words rang deep inside of her. Her voice flowed again, more easily with practice.

“And yourself? You are a good man, yet you are in the darkness here with me.”

“Sane and good are not the same thing. Yes, I’m sane. What of it, if I can smell the sickness of others? The flavors of their feelings rich in my nostrils? It was a boon to my medical practice, for certain, but I’ve got other proclivities you need not know of. No, in the end . . . I am not a good man.

“But that’s neither here nor there in the darkness. This particular darkness, anyway, the one you and I find ourselves denizens of. We are here because we’re the sanest people in this establishment, so they put us down here as the bedrock on which to gain a foothold for the wanderings of their own minds. They call us insane, then feed their own insanities on our flesh, for we are now less than human. Heedson and Croomes are but examples of the greater world, love. They work their discreet types of madness on us, power and pain, and we hold to our truths in the darkness.”

Grace considered his words, her hand small and cold still resting inside Falsteed’s warm one. She could feel his breath on her ear but didn’t mind his closeness or the hint of warmth that emanated from him as their bodies pooled their resources in the cold.

“Who is this Dr. Thornhollow you spoke of?” she asked.

“Him? He’s the sanest of us all.”

“Why is that?”

“Because he knows he’s insane.”

Grace moved to pull her fingers from his grasp, but Falsteed stopped her with his words. “I’m sorry, love. I’m not teasing the words from one who kept them buried so long. I mean what I say. Thornhollow . . . he’s a special bit of a man, and that’s the closest I can come to explaining it.”

“How do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t have to go far outside of Boston and mention my name to find someone who knows it, none of them remembering it for the lives I saved. It’s the other they remember. But Thornhollow, he’s safely anonymous for the moment. Passes through halls like this one with his dark gift and leaves those that he touches silent and still, fragile as the day they were born. Quiet like doves they are, placated with warm milk and sleeping the night through.

“You can always count on a visit from Thornhollow when the Board is about to visit. Heedson feeds the worst of the lot down here, slick as a laundry chute, and Thornhollow, he . . . well, I guess he does the laundry, in a sense. Sends it back upstairs nice and clean, a blank slate for the Board to look upon with approval when they make their rounds.”

“A blank slate . . . ,” Grace repeated, her words lost in a renewed shriek from the spider girl. She rested her head against the cold stones behind her. “Do they forget?”

“I can’t say for sure,” Falsteed said. “There’s a little room down the hall. You’d never see it in this pitch, but Reed comes down with his light when Thornhollow makes his rounds. The violent ones and the screamers, they go in there loud with the doctor, and they come out smelling like blood and metal and, yes, I suppose a type of forgetfulness. Although I’d say it’s more of a removal, a permanent state of that which you’re only now emerging from.”

Grace kept silent, not trusting her throat to handle the voice now running rampant inside of her. All the things she had kept silent boiled inside. The burning rage that Falsteed had diagnosed plummeted into the cold river of her voice and produced a harsh smoke, one that filled her lungs and pushed to overflow from her mouth.

It enveloped her brain, burning off the fog that she’d allowed to settle as easily as the sun ripped the mist away from the morning. She knew it all again, footsteps in the dark and her father’s face looming in the bedroom doorway. It was all seared into her memory, and she knew it as perfectly as she knew the cracks in the ceiling of her cell. All the details of her life, caught forever in her mind. Inescapable.

The blood had slowly ceased to flow down her legs, the fear that came with each drop lost losing its bite as Falsteed had talked to her in the darkness, his voice her anchor. The dress Reed had brought already fit less snugly, the extra flap of skin that had once held her baby evaporating. She’d woken from sleep once to see that Heedson had come to check on her, the bandage on his hand bright in the darkness.

The baby was lost, the purpose of her body gone as it returned to its normal shape. There was nothing to keep her here now, no stain on the family name in the form of a widening waistband. As soon as the scratches from Croomes’s fingernails on her wrists were healed, the bruises on her cheeks from Heedson faded, she’d be returned. She clutched onto Falsteed in the anonymous dark, both her arms slipping between the bars that separated them and clasping on to his broad shoulders and finding bare flesh.

“Is Thornhollow coming for me?”

Falsteed was silent for a moment, and she felt his body rise and fall as he breathed in deeply. “Dearest,” he chided. “You smell of hope. You smell as if you want him to.”